I'm really intrigued. But I just don't know if he can possibly deliver on what he's promising. Not without some of those features being seriously compromised. I just can't see it happening all in one go.

In all honesty, I'm more interested in a decent, single-player space flight sim(preferably Privateer style).

Having a completely separate and fulfilling single player, offline experience plus the persistent online universe is a bit much for me to believe.

IMO they need to dial down Classic just a bit, because as it is now calling it 'classic' is retarded. The old game wasn't near that hard.

Basically yeah. In truth your soldiers dropped like flies in the original too; the difference being you could field a squad of 14 so the mission wasn't FUBAR if 4 squaddies eat a plasma bolt. In XCOM, it's a fail. On Classic mode I finished several missions with only one remaining soldier, having lost 3 highly trained soldiers in the process. 2 or 3 missions like that will easily put you into a death spiral as enemies get tougher and your fielding nothing but rookies. I lost my first 3 classic difficulty games like that - no fun. It feels as though there ought to be a difficulty level in between Normal and Classic.

Prez wrote on Oct 9, 2012, 17:43:Well I've been playing the hell out of it and it really is well done. I am doing my best to beat down that voice that pipes up every so often to remind me how different this is than the original and having marginal success. I definitely love the challenge - I have been wiped out on several missions now, and (like the original) it is really hard to recover from a disastrous mission in which you lose all of your best soldiers and your global approval rating bottoms out.

What the game does, it does extremely well. But I have complaints (surprise surprise). I am not so enamored with the fact that there are no base defense missions. Those consistently were some of the most intense, nerve-wracking missions in the first game (and it was also neat to run around inside something you built yourself) and it is a crime that this feature didn't make it in. Also, I remember fondly attacking alien bases as they started popping up all over the world - those were awesomely difficult and terrifying, but their not here either. My biggest concern, the lack of action point movement, is not as jarring a change as I expected and in fact it works really well. I lamented he lack of randomized maps, and I still do; this is mitigated somewhat by a large variety and randomness of starting points, but I still wish they were in here. Squad size, another huge concern of mine, is still a sticking point with me but it is not a deal-breaker. I would have liked to see squad size upped to 6 at the start and expandable to 8 though. Despite these gripes, the game is extremely fun, challenging, and addicting - three critical trademarks of the X-COM brand so that is a relief.

I hope the game sells well enough to warrant a sequel with those crucial features added back in. Firaxis may be on the verge of doing what began to seem impossible - pleasing hardcore X-COM fans with a modern re-imagining.

Slashman wrote on Oct 9, 2012, 13:49:What really pisses me off is that I have to wait a whole 2 extra days to play just because I'm not in the US. Why in the hell do I have to wait when I pre-ordered and paid the same money as everyone else???

And sometimes you'll get it first. Some games will launch on Friday in the UK and the next Tuesday in the US.

Blame your brick & mortar system. It isn't like this hasn't been discussed to death. It will be broken soon, but for the time being every country still operates on its standard delivery dates. In part because there's the belief that more people will see something online and expect it to be in stores than there are people will see it online in other regions and expect it to be available in their own.

That would make more sense if I was even in Europe. I'm in the freaking Caribbean and Steam doesn't even treat me as a european customer. Maybe I'm outside classification or some such nonsense.

Do movies/games typically come out on Thursdays for you?

I agree it's silly, but given that it's about a billions degrees below zero in the US I consider it a worthy tradeoff for the awesome weather you're likely having. No matter what unfair advantage we're getting, it's a tradeoff for crappy weather!

Slashman wrote on Oct 9, 2012, 13:49:What really pisses me off is that I have to wait a whole 2 extra days to play just because I'm not in the US. Why in the hell do I have to wait when I pre-ordered and paid the same money as everyone else???

And sometimes you'll get it first. Some games will launch on Friday in the UK and the next Tuesday in the US.

Blame your brick & mortar system. It isn't like this hasn't been discussed to death. It will be broken soon, but for the time being every country still operates on its standard delivery dates. In part because there's the belief that more people will see something online and expect it to be in stores than there are people will see it online in other regions and expect it to be available in their own.

That would make more sense if I was even in Europe. I'm in the freaking Caribbean and Steam doesn't even treat me as a european customer. Maybe I'm outside classification or some such nonsense.

What really pisses me off is that I have to wait a whole 2 extra days to play just because I'm not in the US. Why in the hell do I have to wait when I pre-ordered and paid the same money as everyone else???

The writing was kind of on the wall though. I was following this game on the Kalypso forums and there was never any word on there from any of the actual dev team...just from Kalypso mods.

They never released any gameplay vids or gave any hands-on previews. People had been asking them to provide beta access for preorders. There was never anything.

The only thing they ever released was some kind of online magazine type thing with all this positive spin and then the game went live and the crap hit the fan. Hard.

The German players got it first and flooded the forums with all the bugs they were finding...and there were heaps and heaps. From there, everyone knew what was going on... basically another SotS 2, except this time from an unknown developer with no history of sticking to their game for the long haul like Kerberos.

All Kalypso did was give out free game codes for Dungeons and Patrician 4. And then they stopped even that. There was never a refund offer like Kerberos did with SotS 2. Steam actually relented and gave refunds to some people when they protested hard enough and others waited to see if they could fix the game. Guess that will never happen.

Smellfinger wrote on Oct 4, 2012, 12:08:Why have do we need quests at all? Why bother crafting a massive world if you force players to follow the same path from beginning to end? Non-linear exploration and freedom of choice used to be what differentiated MMORPGs like UO and EverQuest from single player games.

Because probably 90% of current-day MMO players need to have their hand held to entertain themselves. You can't just give them a sandbox and tell them to have fun, they'd stand in the starting zone going "WAAAAH WHAT DO I DO?!" while breathing through their mouths.

Creston

Yes, because putting players into a sandbox and having them spend the time to figure it out on their own like it's a real job or something is SO FUN... ...

Worked just fine in Ultima Online. Just fine. There wasn't a single quest anywhere, and it entertained hundreds of thousands of people.

Normal people do not spend their life inside a video game, inside their moms place.

Which has exactly nothing to do with nothing being discussed, which seems to be quite the common denominator of just about every post you make.